HTTP status codes
Numeric codes in an HTTP response that tell crawlers how to treat a URL: 200 index it, 3xx follow the redirect, 404/410 drop it, 5xx come…
Crawling Indexing
Soft 404
A URL that returns HTTP 200 while displaying content that means 'not found' or has no real content, causing search engines to treat it as an error.
In full
Google detects soft 404s heuristically from page content — empty result templates, 'product no longer available', near-empty pages — and excludes them from the index. They waste crawl budget and hide genuine errors from reporting. The fix is to return a real 404 or 410 for missing resources, or to make the page genuinely useful (for example, an out-of-stock product page with alternatives and a 200 status).
Example
A JavaScript app renders 'Sorry, that page doesn't exist' inside a 200 response; Search Console files thousands of URLs under 'Soft 404'.
Related terms
Index bloat
A condition where a site has far more URLs indexed or crawlable than it has genuinely useful pages, diluting crawl attention and…
Out-of-stock handling
How a site treats product pages when items are temporarily unavailable — keeping them live with accurate availability rather than removing…
JavaScript rendering
The execution of a page's client-side JavaScript by a search engine so that content and links generated at runtime become indexable.
Crawl budget
The number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period, set by crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.